Federal researchers found that restaurant workers wash their hands about one time in three when they should. A humor book about bathroom etiquette makes the case that the holiday cooking season is a good time to ask how the rest of us are doing.
By Daniel Reyes
Open any cookbook to any recipe and read the instructions. Preheat the oven. Dice the onion. Fold in the egg whites. What you will not find is the step that matters most, because it happens before the recipe begins, and it happens in another room.
Wash your hands after using the bathroom. Use soap and hot water. Dry them well. Then, and only then, touch the food.
It sounds too basic to need saying, which is exactly the problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, restaurant workers wash their hands when they should only about one time in three. In the agency’s observations, workers faced roughly nine moments an hour that called for handwashing and washed two or three times. Only one worker in four washed after handling raw animal products or dirty equipment. Only one in ten washed after touching their own face or body.
Those numbers matter because of where they lead. The CDC says germ spread from workers’ hands to food accounts for nine of every ten outbreaks in which a food worker contaminated the food. The food itself is rarely the villain. The hands that prepared it often are.
A reminder close to home
Earlier this month, health officials in Tennessee began investigating a possible foodborne illness outbreak associated with a meal at a Walmart fulfillment center in Lebanon. Emergency crews triaged roughly 25 to 30 patients at the site, and 19 people were taken to the hospital. The Tennessee Department of Health has not named a cause, and it would be irresponsible to guess whether hands, ingredients or something else is to blame. The investigation is still open.
But the episode is a fair reminder of what is at stake whenever food is prepared for a crowd. A single shared meal can sideline a workplace in a night. Multiply that by every office potluck, church supper, school fundraiser and family reunion on the calendar between now and New Year’s, and a thirty-second habit starts to deserve more respect than it gets.
Why smart people skip it
Nobody believes dirty hands are a good idea, so why so many skipped washes? The answer has less to do with character than with circumstances. The CDC found that workers washed more often when they were not busy, when their restaurant provided food safety training, and when there was more than one hand sink, with at least one in plain view. Younger workers and non-managers washed less often than older workers and managers. The agency’s advice to restaurants follows from that: train people, especially younger employees, remove obstacles like hard-to-reach sinks and time pressure, and redesign prep steps so fewer washes are needed in the first place.
In other words, handwashing is partly a design problem. If the sink is far away, the line is long and nobody has shown you why it matters, you will cut the corner. Most of us would.
Anyone who has hosted a party knows the setup. The kitchen is crowded, the guests are hungry, and the soap dispenser has been empty since Tuesday. Good intentions do not survive that.
An unlikely messenger
One of the more unusual attempts to get the message across is a book of bathroom-etiquette verse, The Legend of Confuse-us: Timeless Bathroom Wisdom from the Ancient Scholar, by Laurence Grant. Published in hardcover in September 2025, it is a collection of rhymes, commandments, song parodies and jokes built around an invented philosopher, a supposed contemporary of Confucius who cared less about the nature of virtue and more about whether the guest bathroom was properly stocked. The sage is entirely fictional. The advice, in this case, is not:
When done in the bathroom, I certainly hope That you wash hands with water and soap Before touching food, don’t be a dope.
Grant says in the book’s introduction that he spent more than eighteen years as an account executive in the nutrition field, much of it on the road, and came to see hundreds of bathrooms along the way. He does not claim any medical expertise. His method is the rhyme, and he writes in the introduction that he hopes readers will remember some of the jingles. In a chapter on food handling, he warns that anyone who rushes from the bathroom to the kitchen without being sanitary might make loved ones sick, “just like good ole’ Typhoid Mary.” It is not subtle, and it is not meant to be.
There is a serious point under the silliness. Public health agencies have asked people to wash their hands for generations, and the message still slips past because it feels obvious. Humor is one way to get an obvious message to land a second time.
What to do before the holidays
You do not need a new gadget or a new law. A few small commitments will do, plus a few small upgrades if you plan to have company.
Wash properly. The CDC’s standard guidance is simple: wet your hands with clean running water, lather with soap, scrub for at least 20 seconds, rinse, and dry with a clean towel or the air. Twenty seconds is longer than it feels. Humming “Happy Birthday” twice gets you there. Wash the backs of your hands, between your fingers and under your nails, not just your palms.
Make the wash the first step, every time. The cook who just came back from the restroom, the guest who is “just going to help with the rolls,” the teenager who has been handling a phone: all of them go to the sink before they touch anything edible. A host who says “sink first” sounds fussy for about four seconds and thoughtful for the rest of the evening.
Stock the room like you mean it. The CDC’s findings suggest that easy access matters. At home, that means soap that is actually in the dispenser, hot water that actually runs hot, and a clean, dry towel or a stack of paper ones within reach. If guests have to hunt for any of that, they are less likely to do the job. A second sink in view, whether in the kitchen or the powder room, helps even more.
Hold employers to the same standard. If you manage a restaurant, a catering crew, a school cafeteria or a church kitchen, the research is on your side. Train people early, show them why, and fix the sink. Grant’s book puts the point to employers in a couplet: your employees will serve us with clean hands, we hope, so fix the hot water and stock plenty of soap. A good manager does not have to rhyme to get there.
The simplest safety measure we have
Foodborne illness is not a mystery with a complicated cure. Much of it is preventable with a bar of soap and a little patience at the right moment. The CDC has told us what the gap looks like: about one correct wash in three.
Closing that gap will not make headlines. The meal will go as planned, the guests will go home well, and no one will ever know what did not happen. Good food safety is invisible when it works.
So before you carve the bird or plate the appetizers, take the one step that no cookbook prints. You will be in good company with an imaginary philosopher and every real public health agency.
The Legend of Confuse-us: Timeless Bathroom Wisdom from the Ancient Scholar, by Laurence Grant, is available on Amazon. More at confuse-us.com.
Sources: CDC, Food Worker Handwashing in Restaurants (reviewed August 2026); WSMV-TV reporting on the Tennessee Department of Health investigation in Lebanon, Tennessee (October 12, 2026).
